How To Manage Documents On Your Mac

If there’s a single major issue that the teachers in my school have with their Macs, it’s managing documents and files.

After awhile, all those instructional files, folders, documents add up to major clutter, which turns into disorganization, and that gives teachers headaches. It’s also a problem for their Mac system administrator. Me. So, I recommend a number of Mac utilities which help turn clutter into organization. Example? Yep. It’s like iPhoto for documents.

iPhoto For Documents And Files?

Yep. Most Mac users have no trouble grasping the organizational strength of iPhoto.

Sure, iPhoto does more. It can enhance photos, upload photos, share photos. Basically, iPhoto is an organizational tool for digital photographs.

Yep is an organizational utility for files, folders, and documents—perfect for the home, small office, or school.

It’s one thing to stuff hundreds or thousands of Office documents, iWork files, or PDFs into the Mac’s Documents folder. It’s something else again to figure out where a specific file might be.

Spotlight, while fast and thorough, seems to bog down and complicate the search process when hundreds or thousands of files show up in a search.

Search Is Not Fun

Some of our teachers are fastidious and put files into the Documents folder with some semblance of order. Files within folders. Folders within folders.

The rest of us tend to drop our files into the Documents folder and hope for the best. Yep doesn’t care where you place your files. Our teachers think of Yep as a mini version of Spotlight that focuses on just the files you want, where you want them.

Remember, Spotlight finds everything, but also stacks the findings in one humongous lump. Sure, you can filter and narrow the search, but that adds extra steps, and some users are not as adept at the intricacies of Spotlight as others. Yep is drop dead simple to use.

Keeping It Simple

Yep’s interface is at once familiar and intriguing. It looks like iPhoto or iTunes. Toolbar at the top. List in the center. Details of any selected file show up in the right column.

Searching is a matter of clicking the right button for file types. Word documents. iWork files. PDF files. Web pages. Even scanned files like receipts, medical records, letters, tax returns—whatever is cluttering up your home or office—can be dropped into Yep for storage and retrieval.

Yep also creates text files from a simple drag and drop process. Drag and drop text from a web page or email. Create notes or create image files. Drag and drop is your friend.

If you think Yep is one giant database, you’re half right. There’s no database maintenance or corruption to worry about. Yep saves your files as, well, files. The original file.

Built in to Yep is a version of OS X’s Quick Look, so you can click, and look inside a document’s contents without actually opening the application that made the document.

How many documents can you handle in Yep? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Yep says over 100,000 documents can be managed with ease.

I don’t view Yep as a replacement for paper, but it does make management and retrieval of documents and files much faster, much easier, and it requires little organizational steps—much like iPhoto and iTunes.

If your home or small office or school has your Mac cluttered with Office documents, iWork files, PDFs, and anything else, Yep is a handy, affordable utility that’s a welcome step toward digital organization.